BMW Motorrad World Endurance Team kept itself in the FIM Endurance World Championship title fight by finishing last weekend’s 44th Coca-Cola Suzuka 8 Hours Endurance Race as the best European squad.
The Belgian outfit’s sixth-place finish in Japan’s round of the EWC means it heads to the season-deciding Bol d’Or next month third in the provisional standings, 38 points down on leader and defending champion F.C.C. TSR Honda France.
Taking the tremendous commitment of the Japanese manufacturers into account, as well as the strong line-up of competitive Japanese teams and riders on home soil, we can be extremely pleased to secure sixth place, being the best European team, said Marc Bongers, BMW Motorrad Motorsport Director. This becomes even clearer when you see where our main world championship rivals finished. We dropped a few points to [TSR] but got closer to YART and moved further ahead of SERT. This means that the world championship is still wide open, as one-and-a-half times the points will be awarded at the season finale.
He continued: The team gave another faultless race performance that underlines our consistency. The rain made the final hours somewhat tricky. We also had a few minor technical issues during the last stint, which cost us in terms of lap times but not positions.
The performance of the tyres in our package must be regarded as critical. The statistics don’t lie. But we performed well, thanks to support from Dunlop, and Dunlop Japan in particular. We are working hard on further improvements with our partner, which we hope will allow us to battle for the world championship at the next race, the Bol D’Or season finale. The omens are good.
Team Manager Werner Daemen added: Before the race I said that a top-eight result would be perfect because we did not have the strongest package here. The riders did a tremendous job. P6 in the end is really great. I am pretty exhausted but very much looking forward to the last race of the season where everything is possible.
Original Source [ FIM EWC ]
